


Meager Ambitions

by Nokomis



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-02
Updated: 2012-04-02
Packaged: 2017-11-02 22:55:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,256
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/374274
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nokomis/pseuds/Nokomis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Everything Regulus Black did was for his family.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Meager Ambitions

It shouldn’t have been a surprise to Regulus that his brother was leaving.

He watched, wide-eyed, as Sirius recklessly threw his favorite belongings into a sack, eschewing anything that was too closely associated with the family. Regulus couldn’t help but flinch as a ring with the Black family crest engraved in it - had been in the family for generations, and his mother had bestowed it on her eldest son in hopes of instilling in him a sense of familial pride - rolled under the wardrobe, settling in the dust.

Sirius had never worn it. Had never even considered wearing it, and Regulus resisted the urge to scamper across the room and grab it and hold it close and safe.

“You can’t just _leave_ ,” Regulus tried again.

“Course I can,” Sirius replied. He gave Regulus a contemptuous look. “If you weren’t Mother’s little lapdog then you’d want to leave too.”

In their mother’s eyes, Sirius was a disappointment, but still the heir of the House of Black. Regulus was the spare. 

Maybe that would change now.

“But,” Regulus tried again, but he couldn’t think of an argument Sirius would understand. “I’m your brother.”

Sirius snorted and closed his rucksack. “James is the closest thing I’ve got to a brother.”

Regulus stared after him as he strode out of his room for the last time.

*

His mother did not speak of Sirius’s absence. Instead, the house began to feel tight and claustrophobic, familiar shadows feeling as though they were trapping him.

The silence was as thick and foreboding as when Sirius had written home proudly declaring himself a Gryffindor.

Then, Regulus hadn’t left his room for days, carefully painting the Black family crest on his wall.

Sometimes his father would clear his throat, as though he were going to say something to Regulus, but his mother would shoot him a look, and he would return his attention to his newspaper.

Regulus took to sitting alongside his father in the library, ignoring the click of his mother’s knitting or the occasional rare grunt of displeasure when he spoke, trying to fill the terse silence with anything. He picked up the pages of newspaper his father had finished reading, devouring the tiny, cramped lines of news in the firelight, his best connection to the rest of the world.

Surrounded by shelves cluttered with the oddments and curios of generations worth of Blacks, trapped by silence, Regulus noticed the words of one politician because they were what he wanted to scream himself. To make his mother break this horrid silence. To give his father the strength to take control.

He began to clip out the articles that spoke most to him, and carefully taped them to his wall, under the family crest he’d painted years before.

Sprawled out across the wall like that, the words of Lord Voldemort seemed to encompass everything Regulus had ever felt. Suggested things he’d never thought to desire, but that...

But that he could take, now that he was the last loyal son of the house of Black.

*

After he made his way home after his induction into the Death Eaters, Regulus accidentally stumbled into the wrong room. (Hundreds of boyhood hours, running in this room and watching Sirius and bragging about his own meager successes. Sirius was gone.)

He stared around at the walls, filled with creepy motionless pictures of Muggle girls and Muggle transportation and Gryffindor banners, and let out a choked sound.

He was doing his family proud. He was upholding the lineage, the honor, the tradition.

A thought struck him, and he dropped to the floor, hoping it would still be there. He groped under the wardrobe, found the ring emblazoned with the Black family crest, and slipped it on his finger.

It immediately fell off again, much too large for Regulus’s fingers.

He tried to catch it, missed, and flinched as it clattered to the floor.

*

He quickly returned home, stumbling through the door and heading straight into the kitchen, ignoring his mother’s call from upstairs.

“Kreacher!” he cried. 

He remembered the Dark Lord’s stare with a shiver, and it seemed fantastical that he had actually been chosen to help with what was clearly an important task. Something only the Dark Lord’s closest would be privy to. It had been a year, and though his cousin was a favorite, Regulus had not been entrusted with any real task until this proud, shining moment.

Kreacher appeared, offering him his favorite snacks, and Regulus brushed aside the offer and explained that Kreacher was to do the Dark Lord a great honor.

He was unsure what mad impulse lead him to insist that Kreacher come home directly afterwards, but when the elf appeared hours later, shaking and eyes reddened from pain-wracked sobs...

It didn’t seem like an honor. 

(The Dark Lord would treat his inferiors this way, as was his prerogative.)

Regulus thought of the wall honoring the family’s lost servants, as much a part of their history as the paintings of long-dead ancestors, and for the first time began to doubt. 

*

Regulus had known what Horcruxes were since childhood. The family library was filled with books about the blackest of Dark Arts, and Regulus had spent much more time there than his brother, hoping to gain recognition by his parents over his superior knowledge, anything.

It was considered one of the most evil forms of magic, and the thought of rending your soul into bits and shoving it into an object - something destroyable - in hopes of immortality was....

Unthinkable.

He’d had a nightmare, once, about it. About dying and spending eternity in broken pieces. About never being whole, and continuing on and on...

It had seemed to him a far worse fate than death.

The Dark Lord cared nothing for family lines; he had no children of his own, and had abandoned his own name. 

Regulus bore the name Black proudly, and would never abandon that.

Not for promises of glory that were false as his hope. 

*

Before he went to collect Kreacher, he considered speaking to his mother, who still beamed with pride at any mention of the Death Eaters’ activities, finally proud of her younger son, but decided that he couldn’t bear to see her heart broken a second time by a second son. 

He considered telling his father that he was finally acting like a true son of the house of Black, that he finally understood what being the last remaining heir meant, but that felt too much like an apology even in his own head. 

He thought of his brother, and debated with himself for long, broken seconds before picking up the tiny pot of Floo powder, and lighting his fireplace.

He called out the address to Sirius’s flat, and stuck his head into the flames, and tentatively said his brother’s name aloud for the first time in years.

There was no response, and all Regulus could see was darkened rooms and sluggishly moving photographs. He pulled the Black family ring from his pocket, and stuck his hand back through the flames to set the ring in front of Sirius’s fireplace, hoping that his brother would understand, for once.

He pulled back, and tried to brush away the soot that was burning his eyes.

*

When he carefully folded the note and tucked it in the locket, he laughed wildly, feeling as reckless as Sirius always seemed.

This was it. It was time.

Regulus had to take back the Black family’s pride, because he was the only one left who could.


End file.
